The signed agreement was done in December, about three months after the funeral. It was a document that said, in legal language with all the appropriate parties and references, what Patricia and Daniel and I had negotiated: the roof advance acknowledged and repaid from proceeds, the remainder split equally per the will, the house listed in January with both parties cooperating in the sale process.
The document did not say that Daniel had been wrong, because legal agreements between family members don’t say those things. It said what the practical terms were going forward.
When I signed it, I felt something I hadn’t expected to feel: relief adjacent to sorrow. The practical dispute was over. The thing that wasn’t over was the longer, slower work of being a family with this history.
I signed it and went home and made dinner and read until I fell asleep on the couch, which I did more often than I should have because the couch was close to the kitchen and I was still not entirely used to the two-bedroom apartment having a bedroom that was separate from everything else.
SORTING THE HOUSE
The sorting of my mother’s possessions was the part of this process that didn’t make it into the legal summary and is maybe the part that mattered most.
I had about eight weeks, from when the agreement was signed to when the house was listed, and Patricia had given me a practical description of the state of the house that the estate needed to present to buyers. The real estate agent, a woman named Donna who had sold three houses in this neighborhood in the past two years and knew exactly what buyers wanted, came through in January and identified about twelve things that needed attention before listing. Most of them were minor. One of them, the decluttering of what she gently called “lived-in accumulation,” was substantial.